Orientalism: Chapter 1, Part 1 Summary & Analysis

Said begins his analysis of Orientalism’s scope by analyzing Arthur James Balfour’s impassioned speech in favor of ongoing British involvement in Egypt in the summer of 1910. Balfour draws his ideas directly from Orientalist discourse. He associates power with knowledge when he bases the British right to rule Egypt in its superior knowledge of Egyptian history and culture. When he says that Egyptian society is chaotic and disorganized and must be controlled by a British colonial government, he asserts that civilization itself requires the domination of the Orient and implies that Oriental subjects are irrational. When he explains that current agitation for independence lies not in Egyptians’ real desire for autonomy but in their fear of losing British protection, he treats the Egyptian population as a unified bloc, then speaks on its behalf as a knowledgeable Orientalist rather than letting the Egyptians express their own preferences.

Other late 19th- and early 20th- century British civil servants echo the logic of Balfour’s Orientalism. This is evidence, Said says, of an effective discourse. Orientalism divides the world into two spheres (East and West) and excuses the subjugation and exploitation of Oriental subjects. Like Balfour, Lord Cromer’s accounts of his years as a colonial authority in India and Egypt (written around the turn of the 20th century) continually assert that because “subject races” cannot understand or supply what they need to thrive, the British must colonize them for their own good. Both Balfour and Cromer draw evidence for their assertions from what Said calls “the codes of Orientalist orthodoxy,” which had developed over preceding centuries. These described “irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, [and] ‘different’” Oriental subjects as the polar of “rational, virtuous, mature, ‘normal’” Europeans.

The Orientalism of Balfour and Cromer, which Said classifies as “modern Orientalism” takes older ideas, repackages them in the scientific and rational language of post-Enlightenment Europe and uses them as a political tool to justify European dominance during the great era of colonial expansion, which took place between 1815 and 1914. For example, in an essay titled “The Government of Subject Races,” Cromer describes colonialism as a machine designed to extract knowledge, human capital, and resources from the Orient and deliver those back to the Western leaders capable of administering them properly. Crucially, Cromer’s writings insist that certain kinds of people—Oriental subjects—should be studied by certain experts (Orientalists), because understanding a culture is a prerequisite for Western command.

To show the persistence of Orientalist discourse, Said gives two contemporary examples showing how these ideas still have cultural currency in the United States of the 1970s. An essay written by American diplomat Henry Kissinger neatly divides the world into “us” (Americans or Westerners) and “them” (the so-called Third World). Of course, in Kissinger’s view, the West is superior, and the “new” countries of the global south are ignorant and impotent, despite ample 20th-century evidence—in the form of wars, revolutions, and cultural production—that these binary views ae inaccurate. And like his predecessors, he hides his value judgments with deceptively neutral language. Likewise, when an essay explaining the psychology of Arab people by a former State Department bureaucrat collapses millions of people from dozens of cultures and centuries of history into the racist caricature of the brutal, vengeful, bloodthirsty, irrational, antisocial, anxious, hostile, and deceptive Arab subject, it offers these value judgments as empirical facts.